Category: Observer

Grilling season arrived early last weekend in Ontario. The gorgeous weather had many shoppers headed for the meat counter to check out beef for the BBQ, a summer tradition. And although it’s still early, it looks like beef producers will have a lot to smile about with the best grilling months still to come.
Photo credit: Lone Star Steakhouse, Mount Pleasant, Facebook

We have five grandchildren; three of them are what you’d call “farm kids.” They live on a family grain and livestock operation near Thamesville (by Chatham), and I suspect that’s where they’ll be until they leave home.
Photo credit: The Western Producer

The livestock sector is uncorking champagne this week: In Canada, gene editing has been declared safe for livestock feed development, and that’s cause for celebration.
The declaration, by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Canada’s regulatory body for food and agriculture, means feed containing genes that have been changed through high-tech editing can be fed to animals entering the food chain.

Photo credit: agcanada.com

Nowhere is the cornucopia of local food more evident than at farmers’ markets. They’re steeped in history, right back to when they were a popular outlet for buying necessities, not novelties.
Photo credit: Graphic Node on Unsplash

A five-year plan was once the norm in management. But even before the world started going haywire (i.e., pre-COVID), doubts were emerging in some circles about anyone’s ability to look that far down the road.
Enter the three-year plan. However, even that was a stretch.

Photo credit: Grain Growers of Canada

Ontario is one of the least windy provinces in Canada, except for pockets around the Great Lakes…which is also where the country’s most dense population is found, along with some of its best farmland.

Think about your favourite ad. Is it fun and witty, or is it meant to inform? Probably it’s the former; some of the best comedy writers are ad writers.

Photo credit: Getty Images

It’s Canadian Agricultural Safety Week, an annual event designed to draw attention to some of the challenges facing the country’s 190,000 farms.

Getting people to care about soil shouldn’t be hard. After all, if our soil is in trouble, then we’re all in trouble, for what should be obvious reasons.

But that hasn’t been the case, at last outside of the farming community.
Photo credit: Catherine Ulitsky, USDA/Flickr

I’m hoping the United Nations special rapporteur on modern slavery, who singled out Canada a few weeks ago for what he believes is a faulty temporary farm worker program, is paying attention to a new report that offers another perspective.
Photo credit: Getty Images

Climate, good and bad, has always affected farming. There’s no way around it, and farmers have come to live with the ups and downs that accompany an occupation so influenced by the whims of nature.

Photo credit: Bob Nicols USDA

It seems that when it comes to farmland, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan knows something that Ontario Premier Doug Ford doesn’t – that is, farmland must be protected, not given to developers and squandered.
Photo credit: Marvin Shaouni

If any political party wants to swoop in and try capturing Ontario’s farm and rural vote, I’d say now’s the time.

It’s hard to imagine anyone having faith in the government after the current Greenbelt debacle. But it’s a particular blow to rural Ontario, which has traditionally put its faith and hope in the Conservatives.
Photo credit: CBC

The fight between the US and Mexico over genetically modified (GM) corn isn’t even at the dispute settlement panel stage yet. But that hasn’t stopped Canada from piling on.

Photo credit: Global Affairs Canada